Thanks. It would definitely be useful to show an audit trail of settlement and when the roundup occurs.
Why does it matter if settlement can take some. Time with regard to round ups?
Also you mean ARS is on a downward trend (as it pretty much has been for years). Because of this you get more ARS per GBP (though sadly the Mastercard rate causes me to lose about 30% of the true market rate).
It matters because we believe that as much as possible, the feed has to relate to actions made by the user for full financial empowerment.
The feed, in our view, should largely operate on this hierarchy for personal accounts, and in terms of frequency this is also accurate.
In terms of financial control, and feelings of empowerment over what’s happening with your money, the vast majority of feed items should either be in a response to a direct user action or operating on an understood schedule.
Triggering round-ups on presentment wouldn’t allow us to do that, for the following reasons:
Presentments will happen at a random time that is meaningless to the user. They also happen in bulk, so for example, you might buy a coffee every day before work, and the merchant might batch present them all out on a Friday. So then you’d have two options - either the feed items come in in real time, and out of nowhere you get several roundups in a row that, in the case of the earliest auths, will be several days removed from the transaction. OR you generate historical feed items that the user would have to scroll back to see and not understand why their balance has seemingly arbitrarily changed.
In the case of accommodation or vehicular rentals, you’re then working with pre-auths and a 30 day window, which exacerbates the above scenario even more. Additionally, the round-up amount would feel more random, because the presentment amount (and thus roundup differential) would often be seen before a finalised bill that would often come via email. Essentially, the pre-auth figure is more meaningful to the customer because it’s tied to a physical action of payment compared to the final settlement amount, where often people may only recall a general figure that they understand to be correct.
The above, of course, applies less to power users. For example, if you choose to use IFTTT, in many cases you’re doing so with the understanding that movements could be triggered by things that are either out your control (like the IFTTT action I made to move 10p to a Pot every time Kanye West tweets) or are triggered by more passive actions/achievements (Pot movements when step count is hit on Fitbit, etc).
But IFTTT by nature is a power user tool. We believe that the above philosophy / hierarchy is relevant for the vast majority of users.
Thanks for the reply. The thing is there are lots of times where Monzo seems to choose options that minimise financial empowerment.
In this case, wouldn’t have an audit history of non-GBP transactions empower the user the most?
Ultimately with international transactions the authorisation amount is transient.
The thing that permanently affects your balance is the settled figure - so that’s what we permanently show once it’s settled. I don’t personally believe that having a public audit of the figures before settlement is particularly useful for the vast majority of users, but I accept that that’s open for discussion and folks are fully entitled to disagree with that point of view.
It would not be particularly difficult to surface this in the app - however, we’ve yet to be convinced that there is either significant demand or utility in us doing this at the moment.
I guess my point is a) which would empower users more? and b) who would possibly lose out by having access to more information?
It drives me nuts it rounds up non-GBP amounts.
Why not turn rounding off on these transactions, its kind of pointless if it doesn’t well “round up” @simonb ?
The “point” is to save incrementally, unnoticed, not fix obsessions about having some sort of neat bank balance.
That would be valid in my book if you’re constantly travelling and paying in non-GBP amounts for the pence to be adding up to anything signifiant. Might be an OCD trait but I’d personally rather it not just put a random amount of pence over if its not actually rounding to a pound. Yes you could just toggle it off whilst you go abroad or pay online but thats a faff.
No offence to anyone who has actually been medically diagnosed with OCD, which is a serious, volatile and often life threatening disorder, but don’t get me started on the current fad for appropriating “OCD” as shorthand for neatness.
It was a current fad about a decade ago. 
Anyway the point is a round up feature should round up in my book. The vast majority of people don’t care if it occasionally doesn’t round up but I do.
And also in your post about 10 minutes ago.
It does.
If it does we wouldn’t be having this conversation. 
If it’s that annoying, maybe switch if off while you’re abroad?
Your expectation doesn’t match current international banking protocols I’m afraid. Simon explained above why what you expect isn’t Monzo’s preferred method.
From what I read he’s just on about why it can’t be applied at a later stage after the amount is known to a past transaction. Which is why I’m saying just don’t attempt the round up at all if theres a slim chance it would ever be the correct amount. I don’t think thats an unreasonable idea but I fully appreciate for most people they couldn’t care less if the rounding function doesn’t really round when it comes to non-GBP transactions.
The idea (in my mind) is that round ups are supposed to be an “invisible” and passive form of saving, right? For that reason, I’m rarely aware of the exact quantity being rounded up. In fact, I’ve hidden the pot that accumulates round ups for the same reason.
The only situation where I can see this issue being frustrating is if you’re aiming for a whole figure account balance at all times.
Yeah its pretty much this, the only people affected by this are the ones wanting the rounding feature to add up, and like seeing whole numbers in their feed.
I’d personally rather see it neat and not attempt the round up over the couple pence for foreign transactions.
But surely your suggestion that they shouldn’t do the round up for non-GBP transactions doesn’t resolve the whole balance figure issue?
I appreciate this but that goes directly against your lengthy post about empowering users?
You can’t say you only try to empower your customers when there’s “significant demand or utility”. It’s either a fundamental and overarching principle to inform design decisions or it’s not.
Well yes if it turned off you would need to manually account either move the extra or moving back from the pot to making a .00 again.
In an ideal world they would have added a trigger to do this for you, that when the actual amount is known it makes a separate transfer to the pot unrelated to the original transaction to be fine under book keeping rules so it’s not adjusting the past.
| 02 / 01/ 2020 | Example | £4.00 |
| 01 / 01/ 2020 | Foreign | $5.56 (~£4.21) |
| 01 / 01/ 2020 | Example | £3.00 |
Then later when it’s known.
| 03 / 01 / 2020 | Coin pot transfer | £0.78 |
| 02 / 01/ 2020 | Example | £4.00 |
| 01 / 01/ 2020 | Foreign | £4.22 ($5.56) |
| 01 / 01/ 2020 | Example | £3.00 |